Love Maps Page 18

  Plan A was to drive up to Maine, find Gus, see if she could get the job cooking at the artist colony. Granted, the offer had been made a couple years ago, but if that didn’t work out, Gus might still be able to help her. Just to be somewhere else, to be back with people making things. God, she couldn’t wait to see Gus! She thirsted for him! All these Connecticut people, she wouldn’t miss one of them, except for Carlos. He was different, he understood, even though he only knew a part, a sliver. Carlos and she, they were like people drawn to each other on a train, people who stay up all night groping, murmuring, who love each other in a fervent way but whose real lives are elsewhere.

  She sneezed again, feeling a cold coming on. But she was in control, the lines of the shadows were razor sharp, as if the booze had backfired and rendered her lucid. Here was the highway, already! They were on their way! Maine! Remember the Maine! Maine was north, follow the North Star to freedom. She craned her neck over the steering wheel, squinting at the stars. Which one was the North Star? The brightest lights were satellites. But maybe that one, so shiny, blurring like a beacon. She pressed on the accelerator, sitting straighter and prouder as the car sped up. She saw him in the airport terminal walking away from her, that lightness in his step. He must have known even then. All those words said and unsaid were just padding. Well, she forgave him. Why not let him be? Why this constant clawing of each other? She curved around a cloverleaf, wiping away a tear. The North Star! Follow the North Star! There were only a few other cars on the highway, cherry-red taillights essing ahead of her. The needle on her gas gauge now hovered just below half a tank. They wouldn’t have to refill until after Hartford. They could get out of Connecticut all together, not stop once in the state.

  Max stirred. She popped a Life Saver in her mouth, cleansing the booze and coffee from her breath. He pushed himself into the space between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s. His hair, charged with static electricity, tickled her neck and cheek.

  “Your Grandpa Max used to get static in his beard,” she said. “It would lift up and point toward Ma. She said it was proof that his love was true.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Max.

  “We’re on a road trip,” she said. “Which means that while we have a destination, the trip is just as important. Doesn’t it feel good to be driving?”

  “Feels like it always does. Except it’s dark.”

  “It’s getting lighter. The sun will rise in a moment, then you’ll be able to see.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Maine.”

  “Maine?”

  “Yes.”

  Max cocked his finger and aimed at the headlights on the opposite side of the highway. “Bang! Bang! Bang!”

  “You’re not angry, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Upset that we’re going?”

  “No, I’m just shooting the bad guys, that’s all.” He blew the smoke off his finger. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” He paused. “What about school?”

  “What about it?”

  “I’m going to miss it.”

  “Yes. But you can miss some school. I never went to any, and I’m literate.”

  “Really?” he said. “I’m really not going to school?”

  “You got it.”

  “Stellar.”

  “Glad you feel that way, Max. We’re going to have a great time.” She took another curve, the accelerator vibrating cheerfully under the sole of her lace-up boot. “We’ll live right by the ocean, listen to the roar of the surf. It’s like the train, but constant and much better.”

  “What about karate?”

  “You can do karate on the beach.”

  “But Sensei—”

  “You remember what Sensei says. You have to have self-discipline.”

  Up ahead, a police cruiser pulled a car over. She slowed down and felt for the coffee she had brought along.

  “Remember the first people who did karate, the peasants in Okinawa. They didn’t have dojos or senseis giving them homework, they did it on their own.”

  “Did you remember my gi?”

  “Yes,” she said, although she didn’t actually remember packing it; she remembered sleeping bags, coffee cans of paint, a canvas stretcher clenched in her teeth. “We’ll comb the beach and make driftwood fires and write messages and stuff them in bottles, then throw them to the waves.” She pulled at the steering wheel. Could she actually live there, facing the ocean, day after day? She’d never liked the ocean since Ma and Max’s plane dove into it.

  The shadowy form of a station wagon passed them. “Bang! Bang!” shouted Max.

  She accelerated. They gained on the station wagon, passed it, left it in the dust. Max cheered. Something opened in her chest, a sweet coolness. Yes. Tori had talked about this ages ago, chiding her about how she ought to go out to the beach, throw a flower … She had been so scornful—an empty gesture, Tor, grossly sentimental, they’re gone, no cosmic splash is bringing them back. But the point wasn’t bringing them back, it was going to the ocean.

  The sun, huge and orange, appeared from behind a bank of steely blue clouds. Up and up, big and impossibly full. “Can you believe it? Look, Max, how beautiful.” The sky glowed pink behind the charcoal silhouettes of abandoned smokestacks, and above, more clouds, horizontal slivers of forget-me-not blue and violet and, wavering in the midst, a strange kind of corkscrew cloud, white, spiraling up at a perfect vertical. “It’s officially day. You can see out the window.”

  “Could before too,” said Max. “Even in the dark. Bang! Bang-bang-bang!”

  Chapter 20

  New York City, November 1989

  Sarah hates going to the doctor, and this kind of doctor, with the torn family magazines on the table, the watermelon-bellied women, the escaped toddler throwing a shoe down the hall—she wants to run from the building screaming. She digs in her bag for the New York Times and stares at the print, unable to make meaning out of the words but comforted by the familiar font. The kid sitting next to her snuffles, a glob of yellow-green mucus suspended from his nostril. His mother sees this also, searches for a tissue, and, not finding any, wipes the kid’s snot away with her finger.

  “Gross, isn’t it? The things you get used to.” The woman wipes her hand on her jeans, a snail trail darkening the fabric.

  Sarah grins, imagining Philip’s reaction. But what does she know? Maybe he wouldn’t be disgusted. He’s a fisherman. What’s a little snot compared to fish guts?

  She pees in a cup. The kid with the runny nose whines. His mother reads him a story, a thick cardboard-paged book about a dog in a dress. The snail trail on her jeans has almost faded away. It strikes Sarah that this woman, this utter stranger, knows something about her that no one else knows. She hasn’t told anyone about the purple line on her home pregnancy test, not Philip, not Maya, not Gus. She’s pretty sure it was a false alarm. Yes, she’s exhausted, but it’s late November, the days are short, she’s been working hard. It feels more like the flu. Or early menopause. It was just a dime-store test.

  “Congratulations, Mrs. Marker, your results are positive.”

  She stares at the nurse, a sad-looking woman with orange rouge and pale, apologetic eyes. A numb panic. “Really?” she hears herself saying, as if she were responding to a piece of mildly interesting gossip.

  The subway platform is packed. A horrible guy in a smelly sweatshirt presses into her. She pushes through the crowd, trying to get away from him, and steps on something that collapses under her. It’s the side of an open violin case, an old one with faded blue lining and moldy pennies among the quarters and bills. The musician, deep into Paganini, has fingerless gloves and very sharp cheekbones. Listening to him, her breath catches, the fall of the notes agonizing and beautiful. The subway arrives and she squeezes on, shielding her belly, still at this point flat as a pancake. The train jerks forward, and she stumbles back on an old woman in a purple shawl. “We neva gonna get outta here,” the old woman says. �
�Neva gonna, neva, neva, neva.” Sarah presses her lips together. She feels sick. It’s probably psychosomatic, although Ma always said that she started vomiting the day after conception.

  The old woman gets out at Lincoln Center, still mumbling, “Neva neva.” The train becomes quiet and the passengers thin out and Sarah stares at the subway map. Her love map without the dots. Philip’s telephone number is on a Chinese takeout menu, but where is that menu? She’d been annoyed the last time she talked to him. He hadn’t gotten the job in Chicago, and instead of looking elsewhere he’d checked himself into a fishing lodge in the Idaho mountains. Rocking chairs on the porch, pine trees, run by a family named McHenry or something like that. He had scattered Conningsby’s ashes in the trout stream there.

  “Why there?” she had asked.

  “It’s beautiful. It’s like the canyon,” he said.

  “But it’s not the canyon. It has nothing to do with Conningsby.”

  “I’d carried them around long enough.”

  “So you toss his ashes in the first stream you see?” Her voice was so shrill, she could almost feel Philip retract. How is it you can feel a silent retraction over a telephone? She should have apologized. But it had been a betrayal. Idaho? Idaho had nothing to do with any of them.

  Maybe that’s why she hadn’t told him about the drugstore pregnancy test, so annoyed at that.

  She searches through the kitchen for the menu. The dishes are piled high in the sink. The newspapers take over the table. There are crumbs, drips of marmalade, open boxes of cereal. There is a picture of him, and her too, on the bulletin board. They are wearing paper hats, jumping from a couch. It was New Year’s Eve a few years back. They were supposed to have their feet off the ground, light and free, at the stroke of midnight. For good luck.

  She finds the Chinese menu under a vase of sagging flowers. His number is scrawled in the margin by the moo shu pork. She dials, her fingers gaining confidence with each push of the button. Usually their conversations are good. The modulations of his voice, his hesitations, his intelligence soothe her, remind her that he is he, not some monster of his own making. And this, this will further catapult them out from that.

  The man at the lodge who answers the phone sounds like he has a wad of chewing tobacco squirreled away in his cheek.

  “Philip Clark, please.”

  “Wait a second.” Shuffling. Silence. “Ah. He checked out a couple days ago, ma’am.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “He didn’t leave any forwarding information?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “That can’t be.”

  “Nothing here, ma’am.”

  She cleans the kitchen. She throws away her cigarettes. She thinks of calling Maya, then Gus, then Wendy Flanders, the only person she knows well who actually has children. But it feels wrong to tell them before she tells Philip. She could call someone anyway, talk about something else. But she doesn’t want to talk about anything else. She could meet someone for a drink. She’s not of the school that believes a little bit of alcohol will destroy a fetus. But the way she feels right now, one drink won’t be enough. She won’t be able to stop. She curls up, a fetus herself, on the rarely used couch, and gazes out at the Hudson, the lights of the boats blurry in a lowlying mist, the windows of New Jersey glowing yellow against the leaden sky.

  *

  Days pass. She paints. She avoids people. She waits for Philip to tell her where he is. She gets home from the studio feeling beat. Breathing is an effort. Blinking is an effort. She reads a book that says this sort of exhaustion is normal. It takes a lot of energy making a placenta. Three or four nights after the trip to the doctor, the phone rings while she’s in the shower. She sprints down the hall.

  “Hi, Sarah.”

  “What’s going on? Where are you? I tried calling you in Idaho.” She should have grabbed a towel. She’s dripping all over the hall.

  “I had to leave quickly, I got a last-minute interview in Georgia.”

  “Georgia?”

  “Yes. There’s a Habitat for Humanity project down here. They are building houses out of scrap materials, stuff that otherwise would be clogging landfills. It’s a pretty great project.”

  “Wait just a sec.” She runs back for a towel.

  “How’s the painting going?” he asks upon her return. Then, because he remembers how she hates that question: “Did you know there’s a Quetzalcoatl Association in Atlanta?”

  She laughs. “An association of sun gods? Or are they making them?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” says Philip. She can feel him smiling on the other end. “It’s all very mysterious,” he continues. “A plain metal plaque on an office door I passed by on my way to the interview. It made me feel as if you were here with me. Send me an invitation to your show and I’ll slip it under their door.”

  “I’m thinking that my Quetzalcoatl would not look Quetzalcoatl enough for an association of aficionados.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “You’ll see them soon.”

  A silence follows, the kind of silence filled with unsaid things. “They’ve offered me a job,” he says finally. “The pay is ridiculous, but they can give me a camper to stay in. It’s just for a few months, until the project’s done. It will give me time to think and do something useful while I’m at it.”

  “Well … that sounds good.”

  “I can’t go back to designing second houses for rich people.”

  “Understandable.”

  “I can’t go back. I mean, even for an instant. ”

  “Are you trying to say you’re not coming to my show?”

  A pause. “Yeah.”

  “You promised, Philip. You said you were going to strut around, proud of your wife.”

  “I’m sorry.” The sorrow of his voice sinks deep into her, a heavier sorrow than their immediate conversation merits. She cannot speak, the phone cold in her hand.

  “Should I go to Georgia?” she asks softly.

  “You need to stay there and work on your paintings.”

  “For the show you’re not coming to.”

  “You’d hate it here.”

  A sound, a sound she cannot bear to hear, rises in her throat. She hangs up, not wanting it to come out, not even saying goodbye.

  *

  Her Quetzalcoatls become more detailed and palpable. When she works on them she forgets her exhaustion and discomfort, intrigued by the knives and Cheshire cats and glorious tumescences popping up out of bushes and fields of color. She is not angry when she paints, though it floods back into her when she leaves the studio. When she paints she is suspended in a strange peace. It’s all right that Philip is living in a camper in Georgia. She is not altogether sorry. His absence allows her to explore things she wouldn’t have dared were he here.

  She tries something new—crude oil, not paint. She wants monochrome. She wants basic ingredients. Oil, sand, ash. Painting with crude oil is more like drawing than painting. There is no depth, only line. And it is more like calligraphy than drawing. There is no erasure. Once the lines are down, they are down. She works in a kind of trance, holding the brush in her hand for great chunks of time, not knowing what’s coming until all of a sudden it happens. A quiet process interrupted by claps of laughter. She draws a plumed serpent coiled around the Empire State Building, à la King Kong. Its enormous jaws are open. Its tongue extends. Next comes a helicopter. Then a sacrifice, a man in a loincloth being fed into the snake by a man in a suit. Then, because this man in the suit feeds the snake midair, she attaches him to cables strapped to the legs of the helicopter. Then the wind, associated with Quetzalcoatl, whipping him, making his job more difficult. She has to draw the wind over what she had already drawn, half obscuring the figures. Then she understands that the helicopter must have a pilot. A high priestess, half Egyptian, half Aztec, with Maya’s profile and her regal neck.

  Maya has sung in Biarritz. She h
as sold a building in London. She is organizing the first North American Fado Festival in San Francisco. It amazes Sarah how unscathed she is. Perhaps it shouldn’t. Perhaps her reaction is more normal than Philip’s.

  *

  On a rainy day in November, Bambi and Gus dry off by the studio’s steamiest radiator, surrounded by a multitude of soaked and disintegrating shopping bags, puddles of water, socks and shoes. Sarah hasn’t seen Bambi since Eric’s funeral. She is pale. Sarah wraps her up in a big hug. “Look at your hair! What have you done? It looks amazing.”

  “I went to a salon,” Bambi declares grandly. “I got a permanent. If I’m going to be spending my life visiting dying people, I’m going to at least look fabulous doing it.”

  “Who wants to be visited by a dowdy old hen?” offers Gus. He lifts a purple expanse of drapes and shoulder pads from one of the bags and eyes it with a bit of masculine discomfort.

  “Eric would have loved it,” says Bambi. Then, as if all the energy was suddenly sucked out of her, she sits down, small and quiet.

  “Where’s that tea we brought?” Gus says, fussing around before finding it.

  “Did you hear that Eric’s friend Asa is also sick?” Bambi asks Sarah. “He’s looking for someone to replace him. Do you know anyone who wants to teach art out in Connecticut? It’s one of those private places, you don’t have to be certified.”

  “I’ll ask around,” says Sarah.

  “Where’s your ashtray?” asks Bambi, dangling a cigarette. “You didn’t stop smoking, did you?”

  “It’s just a temporary thing.” Sarah hands her a saucer. “You can use this.” She’s tempted to tell her about the pregnancy, but it’s still so early. Gus’s eyes twinkle, pleased to be the only one who knows.

  *

  Maya comes back from London a couple days after the Berlin Wall falls, bearing a chunk of it in her suitcase. She presents it to Sarah the night of her arrival, the two of them perched on barstools at a café near Sarah’s studio. A rough hunk of concrete with a splash of maroon spray paint on one side. Sarah holds it reverently. “How did you get it?” She and Gus were at the studio when they heard the news—one of Gus’s crazy aunts had called. They didn’t have a television; they’d huddled around the radio, as if it were the 1940s, listening to a euphoric reporter, the excitement of the crowd, gazing at each other with blank, wondering faces.